My Titan is engulfed in flames and has only one bar of health left. I quickly use my vortex shield, hoping to catch the nimble Stryder Titan I’m battling against off guard. Luckily a salvo of the Stryder’s rockets get caught up in my Titan’s magnetic pull. I launch them back at my enemy, but it’s too late, a Pilot hiding on the roof of a nearby building fires their anti-Titan weapon and my Titan is destroyed in a massive explosion.

My Pilot automatically ejects from the metallic beast, launching me hundreds of feet in the air. As I plummet towards the earth, I whip out my anti-titan rocket launcher and aim it directly at the Stryder.

The missile hits my enemy just as my Pilot’s feet touch the ground and the Stryder explodes. This is Titanfall.

Note: Additional opinion and information will be added to this Titanfall review when the game officially launches on March 11. Titanfall could suffer from significant launch day/week/month issues.

Respawn Entertainment’s new first-person shooter (FPS), Titanfall, has breathed new life into the stagnant genre and made me finally want to venture back into the often intimidating waters of Xbox Live multiplayer gaming.

Titanfall’s verticality is what makes the game feel so different. Traditionally first-person shooters are very ground focused and often tied by the laws of gravity, but in Titanfall this isn’t the case.

The Pilot’s free-running, parkour-style wall climbing and jetpacks means you always need to be on your toes. If you’re camping out on the roof of a building, picking off enemies at a distance, death can strike at any moment and in a variety of ways.

Titanfall controls beautifully. You can really tell Respawn has spent a significant amount of time tweaking the game.

A Pilot could jetpack and wall climb up the front of the building, jetpack across the map from a nearby structure, or even wall run from across the side of a nearby building, aim their sights at you, and blast you away before you even know where they are. This also makes Titanfall feel extremely fast and reminds me of older arena first-person shooters like Quake or Unreal, although it’s important to point out getting the hang of controlling the Pilot’s free-running and wall climbing does take some getting used to.

Pilots also have the ability to take out Titans, a relatively miraculous gameplay balancing feat when you think about it. The anti-Titan weapon is powerful and with just a few rocket blasts or machine gun bullets, you can destroy a Titan. The trick is to make sure you’re always moving and using the Pilot’s unique wall running/climbing abilities. Speed and quick-thinking often helped me take down Titans as a Pilot.

The game’s 15 maps range from wide-open Halo-style Blood Gulch maps to much smaller arena maps. Close-quarters combat can get a little hectic, but the game’s six on six player count keeps things from getting too chaotic. Since the game doesn’t include a traditional single-player campaign, having such a high number of multiplayer maps is almost a necessity. Also, many of the map layouts remind me of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and they probably should since many members of Respawn also worked on that particular genre-altering title.

Wallrunning is an important skill to master in order to be successful in Titanfall.

Then there’s the Titan — a giant hulking mech that truly makes you feel powerful (but not too powerful). If caught in the open as a pilot, Titan’s can easily make short work of you with just a few well placed bullets. Battles between Titans often amount to a game of cat and mouse — hiding behind buildings, recharging the mech’s vortex shield, all while trying to out gun your opponent and dodge a Pilot’s anti-Titan weapons. Titans feel like the giant, metallic beasts you’d expect them to, but they’re also still vulnerable. The balance Respawn has managed to create between Titans and Pilots is impressive and quite an accomplishment.

Surprisingly I have much more fun playing as a Pilot in Titanfall rather than a Titan. Titans may be powerful but they’re also slow and after bounding across a map as a nimble Pilot, I rarely opt to enter the mech. Occasionally it makes sense to jump into a Titan, but it all comes down to timing and what’s going on in the multiplayer match at that given time. I enjoy free-running as a pilot so much that it’s going to be difficult to go back to games like Battlefield 4 or Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Custom and pre-created loadouts for both Titans and Pilots, as well as unlockable weapon upgrades, all standard features with most modern first-person shooters, are all present in the game and surprisingly refreshingly simple. Games like the Call of Duty franchise have over complicated the upgrade process, making creating your ideal loadout an intimidating process.

ft I never thought I’d say it, but I’m actually excited about a first-person shooter for the first time in awhile.

Burn cards also add a little more variety to the mix. They’re different bonuses, like an extra powerful weapon or a Titan class you haven’t unlocked yet, in the form of cards set before the beginning of each match. Burn cards are also earned by accomplishing different in-game challenges. Knowing when to use a burn card is very important and they’re also great for breaking a continuous frustrating death streak.

Interestingly, the final version of Titanfall running on the Xbox One actually looks better than what I experienced in both the game’s beta and alpha builds. Still, it probably isn’t the huge graphical leap forward some people are expecting from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and the game does occasionally suffer from annoying graphical tears, especially when it’s moving at a fast pace.

Titanfall is missing three glaring features though. The absence of local-multiplayer, a disturbingly common trait in games these days, is very disappointing. Normally this wouldn’t bother me very much, but Titanfall is the first game in years that actually could get a group of my friends together for a Halo: Combat Evolved style LAN party.

This Pilot doesn’t look like they’re going to survive much longer.

Also, there isn’t any way to create custom game types right now, although this feature is rumoured to be added to the game at some point through an update.

Then there’s the missing features that always seem pop up in interviews and stories; Titanfall’s lack of a real single-player campaign. Respawn can dance around the question as much as they like, throwing out buzz words like “campaign-multiplayer,” but for many gamers Titanfall’s lack of single-player is a deal breaker. The included campaign mode merely dresses up the game’s multiplayer with a loose story focused on the battle between the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation (IMC) and the militia, with the occasional brief cut scene. It’s a welcome addition to the multiplayer-only game and can be entertaining at times, but it isn’t a true campaign.

Fans of the Call of Duty or Halo franchises will also take issue with the game’s AI controlled Grunts and Spectres, non-player characters included in the game to give noobs something to kill and flesh out some of Titanfall’s more expansive maps. I’ll admit the AI controlled bots do get frustrating at times, especially when a team scores the final points in a game of Attrition (Titanfall’s fancy word for deathmatch) by taking out a few Spectres. I enjoyed the inclusion of Grunts and Spectres and I think it will make the game much more accessible for many players.

Titans are giant hulking beasts that are difficult to maneuver.

One of the questions that still remain about Titanfall is whether or not the game will perform under launch day stress, when presumably millions of people log into the game on March 11th. During Titanfall’s beta there were very few issues and when Respawn finally activated the game’s servers again just a few days ago, while it was difficult to find a match in certain playlists, this won’t be an issue when Titanfall officially launches. Still, it’s very possible the launch of the game will be a complete mess.

I grew up playing first-person shooters like the Halo 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare but over the last few years, I’ve gotten tired of the genre. For awhile I thought maybe I’d just grown out of the whole idea of an FPS, but after spending time with Titanfall, I’ve realized I just needed to play a first-person shooter that approaches the genre in an original way.

Titanfall won’t be for everyone, especially those looking for a single-player experience, but if you’re into multiplayer FPS games, this is one game you really shouldn’t miss. It doesn’t completely change what gamers have come to expect from first-person shooters but instead alters it just enough to feel fresh again.

Titanfall is set to be released on March 11 for PC and Xbox One. An Xbox 360 version will drop later in March on the 25, although not much is known about the difference between the current-generation and next-generation versions of the game.